We are much concerned, on this isle,
as if you haven’t noticed, with questions of
national identity. Careers get constructed out of
throwing in one’s tuppence worth, and keeping
one’s contribution topped up, be they in academia,
print or broadcast journalism, literature, or popular
entertainment. Even advertising has now tapped into
this navel-gazing vein, with a cinema ad for a certain
credit card, which features a protagonist who, after
a disenchanting ramble through the blatant rip-off
commercialism of tourist theme park Temple Bar, settles
down with a pint to the comfortingly affirmatory voiceover
of, ‘Knowing the real meaning of being Irish?
Priceless’.

But what if there is no real meaning attached to being
born with this chance nationality anymore –
if, indeed, there ever was? What if all these boffins
and pundits are not only looking in all the wrong
places, but are on a wild goose chase right from the
get-go? What if the search to define the true essence
of Irishness is merely the pigheaded pursuit of fool’s
gold, a chimera that does not exist? What if the paper
chase quest is solely there to distract us from more
serious concerns or, more terrifyingly, from the bleak
but honest acknowledgement that nothing is serious
anymore?

In the great national identity debate
(or debacle, depending on your point of view), while
several positions suggest themselves, you can, broadly
speaking, be nationalist, or revisionist, or even neo-nationalist
(a term which might be employed to cover the singular
arguments of the redoubtable John Waters, as adumbrated
in the recent 2004 Annual of this magazine). But no
one, to the best of my knowledge, has posited any alternative
approaches to the knotty problem, least of all that
the problem might well be the nature of the question
itself, rather than the stock answers. To quote Thomas
Pynchon, tipping his hat to Wittgenstein, in his mammoth
paranoid WW2 fantasy Gravity’s Rainbow,
‘If they can get you asking the wrong questions,
they don’t have to worry about the answers.’

For what are nationalism and revisionism, but mirror
symmetrical images of each other? Revisionism is an
inverted form of nationalism, or at least a reaction
to it, just another swing of the dialectical pendulum
in the opposite direction. But if notions of Irish identity
are constructed solely in either opposition, or in deference,
to our former colonial oppressor, the irony is that
this makes ‘Irishness’ nothing more than
a direct consequence of colonialism, rather than any
kind of challenge to it, much less an autonomous entity.
Seems like we needed that ‘other’ all along,
that ‘not us’, that ‘old enemy’,
to define ourselves against, to find out who and what
we were and, perhaps more importantly, were not. Well,
I’ve got some news for you: they don’t care.
So, where does that leave us? Time to grow up, and take
our place among the nations of the world, without gate
crashing by grabbing on to the coattails of a near neighbour.

Moreover, viewed from a philosophical perspective, to
say nothing of a psychoanalytical one, you are in trouble
right from the start on the epistemological level, as
well as the ontological one, if you set about constructing
and predicating your identity around nationality, or
looking to it to confer identity. This amounts to nothing
more than a crutch for the insecure, since fatherland
– like faith and family, and perhaps even gender
and sexuality – is ultimately arbitrary. They
are accidents of birth, and it could all have been so
different. For this reason, I should cease using the
subjective and objective pronouns ‘we’ and
‘us’ for the rest of this piece, and consign
the reflexive pronoun ‘ourselves’ to the
rubbish bin. Time to stand on my own two feet, and stop
pretending that all of us on this tiny island are all
in this thing together, that the fact that most of us
were born here somehow gives us a common heritage and
shared identity which unifies us.

John Waters is, however, to be congratulated on highlighting
the limitations of the cosy, soppy, sloppy, middle class
neo-liberal consensus which pervades public discourse
here, and throwing down the gauntlet to its purveyors,
however misguided and wrongheaded his own diagnosis
– never mind his aetiology and prognosis –
of the problem may be. He is clearing the ground for
some sort of sensible, and potentially fruitful, debate
to occur. Trouble is, whenever I hear someone start
sounding off about young people only being interested
in drinking, drugs, sport, pop music and sex, instead
of supposedly more ‘serious’ grown-up type
issues like property prices and interest rates and pension
plans and child care facilities and golf club membership,
I always think it speaks far more unintentionally hilarious
volumes about the person doing the complaining than
it does about young people. And whenever I hear someone
dissing ’60s radicalism – and the admittedly
self-seeking, self-serving irresponsible hedonism that
often accompanied it – as a mere blip in civilisation,
I always wonder what exactly they are comparing it with:
the slight glitch that went on from 1914 to 1918, for
example, or the minor hiccup that took place between
1939 and 1945?

Rock music and sex are still far more important to this
forty-something survivor than politics is or, hopefully,
ever will be. Indeed, it is in the presumption by most
of the usual suspect commentators on the state of the
nation and the issues of the day that power resides
only with, and is exercised only by, politicians that
they make their greatest mistake, as counter culture
figures from Brecht to Orwell, Dylan to Lennon and Geldof
to Bono have amply demonstrated. Even younger politician
pretenders are aware of the need to appeal to the under
30s, and try to keep this segment of the electorate
onside, as evidenced by Tony Blair’s pathetic
courtship of the Blur/Oasis Britpop phenomenon as part
of the Cool Britannia PR job, culminating in his recent
espousal of The Darkness. Tony Blair: the air guitarist
of political rhetoric. By way of contrast, his partner
in crime, the Forrest Gump-like George ‘I’m
not a smart man’ Bush Jr, does not play the saxophone
or court the youth vote by professing to dig rock’n’roll,
maaan. He prefers the role of publicly acknowledged
ex-alcohol abuser who has seen the light through taking
the twelve steps of AA, rather than looking for the
ambivalent cache that would accrue to a leader who lets
it be known that he smoked dope once, but didn’t
inhale. In his faux Air Force jacket, the Commander
of Forces is perhaps more akin to the worried navy officers
recalled by Thomas Pynchon in his introduction to the
collection of his early fiction, Slow Learner.
Perplexed by the growing popularity of Elvis Presley,
these authority figures would stalk the ship on which
Pynchon did his national service, approaching anyone
among the crew who seemed like they might know –
combed their hair like Elvis, for example - and anxiously
interrogate, “What’s his message? What does
he want?”

It is preposterous to argue that idealism – if
this can be equated with broadly left-wing and progressive
sympathies – is solely the preserve of the young,
and that everyone over forty (or is it thirty?), should
be ‘at home watching the news’, as though
a Big Chill-style fall from grace and subsequent
disillusionment are inevitable. Boredom, dull grey conformity,
and a preoccupation with the quotidian may well be the
most common features of life after a certain age, for
most people, but does that mean that no one should take
it upon themselves to rage, rage against the dying of
the light? Granted, there are few sights more risible
than the oldest swinger in town out on the prowl, but
that doesn’t mean there are not workable models
available of how to grow older gracefully, with some
dignity, while retaining one’s integrity, and
some fire in the belly. Dylan isn’t pretending
that he’s still twenty-five, after all, unlike
another of Blair’s heroes, Mick Jagger OBE, who
– despite whatever credibility his long-time partner
in the Rolling Stones, Keith Richards, retains –
it has been impossible to take seriously as a viable
rock star for many years now. Joe Strummer and Johnny
Cash played until their hearts exploded, keeping their
edge and their vision until the end, while Lou Reed,
John Cale, Iggy Pop, Neil Young and Patti Smith continue
to produce work that is every bit as well-crafted and
as iconoclastic, if not more so, as when they first
started. Indeed, there were few Dublin musical experiences
more gratifying than seeing three generations enjoying
themselves in unison at Young and Crazy Horse’s
most recent concert at The Point – the grandparents
in their 50s and 60s who remembered him from first time
around, the middle aged Moms and Dads who picked up
on him subsequently, and the teenage kids who got into
him via his collaboration with Pearl Jam, and the Godfather
of Grunge mantle accorded him by Nirvana and the Seattle
indie scene. The older he gets, the louder he gets.
‘It’s better to burn out, than it is
to rust’. The fact is that every generation
has had its mentors and father/mother figures from the
previous generation, to look up to and learn from. The
hippies had the beats, and the punks – although
they would have been loath to admit it at the time –
always had much more in common with the hippies than
they did with any other sector of society, at least
with the MC5/13th Floor Elevators/Who/Kinks end of things.
The Stones had Robert Johnson, Dylan had Woody Guthrie.
The Velvet Underground have influenced everybody in
subsequent generations, from Sonic Youth to the Jesus
and Mary Chain, from Mazzy Star to Belle and Sebastian.
Nor is having still-credible examples from the previous
generation confined to popular music alone. In literature,
Will Self’s work owes more than a little to that
of William Burroughs and B.S. Johnson, while David Forster
Wallace’s debt to, and respect for, Pynchon and
Don DeLillo is palpable. But, tellingly, as Nick Cave
wrote in his Guardian obituary of Johnny Cash,
‘The saddest thing about his death is that I don’t
think these old voices are being replaced.’ Cave
refused to be drawn when, at one of his Vicar Street
shows last year, after doing a cover of Cash’s
‘The Singer’, a heckler shouted, ‘You’re
The Man in Black now, Nick.’

It can only be dubbed neo-conservative to fulminate
against the young (whoever they are) for having no sense
of Ireland as a nation or a community, and to castigate
the generation in power (yes, all of them) for their
failure to hand on any sense of citizenship or patriotism,
or indeed anything that might be regarded as a sense
of inherited communality, and also for having no concept
of the importance of authority. It is naïve in
the extreme to suppose that authority is always wielded
in the interests of ‘the good’, or even
‘the common good’. At best, it is used to
enforce what one power block thinks is the common good.
More usually, it is exercised in favour of one group’s
narrow range of self-interests at the expense of other,
often larger, groups, and should therefore always be
probed and questioned, not only by those who endure
it but also, ideally, by those exercising it. However,
this is rarely the case, and so should be commended
when it does happen. Edward Said’s remarks on
the concept of authority in Orientalism remain
as pertinent today as they were when the book was first
published in 1978: ‘There is nothing mysterious
or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated,
disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive;
it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value;
it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas
it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions,
and judgements it forms, transmits, reproduces. Above
all, authority can, indeed must, be analysed.’
The exercise of authority in previous generations on
this isle, and praised by neo-conservatives in the current
one, was little more than the institutionalisation of
a culture of fear, and good riddance to it. Moreover,
neo-conservative criticism of what has been called the
‘Peter Pan Generation’ for being intoxicated
with its own love of freedom begs several questions,
since the abstract concept ‘freedom’ usually
remains rather nebulously defined when thrown around
in these debates, and means vastly different things
to different people. From ‘Operation Freedom Iraq’
to ‘Freedom Fries’, it is more often heard
these days in the mouths of the American Christian Right
than it is as the province of radicals or revolutionaries.
‘Keep on rockin’ in the Free World’
as the aforesaid Neil Young sneers vitriolically, on
a stand out track from his magnificent 1989 album, titled
simply Freedom.

What’s with this extolling of the virtues of patriotism
and nationalism anyway? Patriotism: wasn’t that
the last refuge of the scoundrel? Nationalism: isn’t
it a bit dumb to be proud of a place just because you
happened to be born there? Furthermore, ‘the young’
aren’t some homogenous, amorphous mass, with no
internal shades of difference between them, no more
than ‘the generation in power’ are. If you
accept the fact that youth should, broadly speaking,
be a time of experimenting with parameters, of pushing
the boundaries, of – as Nabokov said of his fiction
– ‘reality testing’, which will more
often than not include phases of recreational drug-taking
and casual sex, then the young should be commended for
continuing this noble tradition. However, these days
they are more likely, especially across the water (in
both directions!), to be more worried about getting
into college, qualifying, getting out and getting a
job, and getting an early foot on that property ladder,
and repaying those burdensome student loans. Nor am
I being entirely facetious here about the current ruinous
state of higher education. No less a great wrier than
W. G. Sebald, who earned his living as Professor of
Modern German Literature at the University of East Anglia,
opined in an interview given shortly before his accidental
death that universities were now producing nothing more
than ‘semi-educated consumers’. (Incidentally,
Mary Harney happens to agree with him, since she recently
told the annual economic summit at Davos, Switzerland
that ‘We are all consumers’, and that competition
would sort out any problems that consumers might have
with shoddy products and services.) And the hero of
Disgrace, the Booker Prize winning novel by
last year’s Nobel Prize for Literature laureate,
J. M. Coetzee – who is also a university teacher
– is an academic who is forced to start teaching
modules in ‘Communications’, when he’d
much rather be passing on his love of Romantic poetry.
What price the disinterested speculation which has been
the touchstone of the humanities since the Renaissance
when, between the tyranny of Theory and the pressures
of free market economic policies to be socially ‘relevant’
and ‘productive’, we have talented and creative
educators who are disillusioned about being professors?

Furthermore, it is blatantly obvious that, as well as
the Peter Pan liberals so excoriated by the neo-conservative
argument, the ‘generation in power’ in Ireland
also includes classic laissez-faire proponents
like the abovementioned Mary Harney and her crony Michael
McDowell who, while the Progressive Democrats may have
started out as ‘the conscience of Fianna Fail’,
are now solely interested in imposing strict monetarist
economic policies, and the draconian licensing laws
that go with them, so that we can all be good little
model workers in their free market free-for-all, with
no quality of life whatsoever. They’ll give us
bread, but no circuses. If you happen to dissent from
this capitalist, profit-driven worldview, which makes
money the measure of all things, ‘bleeding heart
liberal’ is the least pejorative term of abuse
that will be thrown at you. More likely, you’ll
hear your views dismissed as motivated by nothing more
than mere ‘envy’ or, worse still, ‘laziness’.
Funny though, that in most continental countries the
government trusts the discretion of the punter, or the
proprietor, enough to let them make up their own minds
about when they’ll go home from the pub. Besides
all of which, the majority party in political power
still calls itself Fianna Fail, even if they have now
lost their divine right to rule single-handedly, and
so must have recourse to coalition with fiscal extremists.
And, as every schoolboy knows, the Soldiers of Destiny
have never been anything more than a catch-all party,
happily bereft of any ideas or ideals, save that of
some dubiously defined sense of ‘republicanism’
and retaining power by giving as many people as they
can whatever they thought they wanted at any given time.
Anyway the wind blows, their reed will bend, but not
break. But that hardly makes Bertie Ahern or Charlie
McCreevy into Peter Pan-figures, now does it?

Why, when you consider it from their perspective, should
young Irish people have any sense of Ireland as a nation
or as a community, or of an inherited commonality? The
world is one, and it is theirs, as it has never been
before. They can come and go as they please, enjoying
a year of sun, sea and sex in Australia if they want
to, while saving some money to backpack around South
East Asia. They can work at bringing the wonderful gospel
of free market privatisation and competitive individualism
to out-of-the-way spots like Mongolia, if it takes their
fancy, so we can all take advantage of another opportunity
to have ‘a cheap holiday in other people’s
misery’, as John Lydon of The Sex Pistols
once had it, if that takes our fancy. Less affluent
or well-educated young people can always take off and
get off their faces for two weeks in Ibiza, while holding
on to that handy software sales job at home. Rather
than bemoan the fact that young Irish people have no
sense of Irishness, the biggest joke is, as it has always
been, ‘Why does Ireland think it matters?’,
or ‘Why does it think it’s important?’,
or ‘Why does it take itself seriously?’
Because of the success of Riverdance and its imitators
(a spectacular which did manage, it must be acknowledged,
the amazing feat of making what is perhaps the most
repressed form of cultural expression on the planet,
where the top half of the body endeavours to keep perfectly
still while the bottom half goes like the clappers,
suddenly sexy)? Because of winning the Eurovision Song
Contest so many times (a poisoned chalice, if ever there
was one)? Because of doing so well in three World Cups
(despite the fact that on each occasion the team could
have gone so much further if they’d had more imaginative
management and better organisation)? And why is every
single achievement by an Irish person celebrated as
a triumph for Ireland (Roddy Doyle’s Booker Prize
win – another victory for Ireland)? For sure,
everywhere on earth thinks it’s the centre of
the universe (hey, earth once thought it was the center
of the universe), but in Ireland this naturally-occurring
narcissism has reached epidemic proportions, to the
extent that one of the conclusions posterity will surely
arrive at is that contemporary Irish social and political
discourse was the most inward-looking on the planet,
since debate here invariably means debate about Irishness,
and any outward reference, any engagement with the world
of not-Ireland, must be fed back into the clinging maw
of our own self-concern.

But look around you, and listen up, gobshites. On any
casual stroll through the heart of the Hibernian metropolis
you will see branches of McDonalds’s, Burger King,
Haagen-Dazs, Gap, Benetton and Kentucky Fried Chicken
on every corner. Look over there, there’s a café
called Phoenix Perk, a local spin on the Central Perk
of TV comedy series Friends. In a similar vein,
there’s a place named Snax and the City, appropriate
given how many twenty-something Irish women take their
cues about how to run their personal and professional
lives from Sex and The City, another instance
of life-imitating-art-imitating-life-imitating-art,
and this despite the fact that the show is written by
a team of gay men, getting a chance to indulge their
wish-fulfilment (which often happily coincides with
straight men’s wet dreams as well) about ‘what
women are really like’. The longest-running
shows on RTE come from the States, or from England (Granada’s
Coronation Street), and the movies in most
of our cinemas from Hollywood. As for homemade productions,
Don’t Feed The Gondolas was Not The
Nine O’Clock News shorn of the satire, while
The View is Late Review with a floating panel,
most of whom – with the odd honourable exception
– know quite a lot about one area of artistic
endeavour, but hardly anything about any others, unlike
the stalwarts of the BBC 2 show they are trying to copy,
most of whom have a broad, well-rounded, appreciation
of the arts. There is a generally-accepted piece of
apocrypha abroad that RTE rejected the idea for Father
Ted. Not so. For so sure was Dermot Morgan and
his associates that the national broadcaster would do
just that, they went straight to Channel 4 with their
proposal in the first place. As for RTE’s effort
at indigenous soap, Fair City, the kindest
thing one can do when confronted with its over-the-top,
supposedly ‘realistic’ storylines and amateur
acting is to pass over it in silence, stopping only
to marvel that people will publicly admit to writing
it and appearing in it – let alone watching it.

When it comes to print media, The Irish Times
is still trying valiantly to keep its tattered tiara
as ‘the paper of record’ polished up, while
simultaneously mutating into just another lifestyle
rag. At least the Indo, whatever its manifold,
manifest shortcomings, isn’t pretending to be
anything other that what it is, an aspirational, middlebrow,
mid-market product. Any discerning music lover is far
more likely to reach for Uncut or Mojo
from off the shelves, in preference to Hot Press,
a self-congratulatory magazine so in bed with the Irish
music business that it is impossible to read any objective
criticism in it. The most consistently readable cultural
review available here on a Sunday is an Oirish edition
of an English newspaper, The Sunday Times.
The idea for VIP was to keep the same format
as Hello, but have Irish people in it. Even
the cover of the November issue of this very magazine
was a direct steal (dressed up and defended as a homage)
of the Annie Leibovich group shots which graced the
covers of Vanity Fair, inviting another prestigious
identification by aping a recognisable and successful
style. (Sorry, Trevor). Harmless enough, you might say,
but it does prompt the question: can anything truly
original ever come out of Ireland?

Meanwhile, back flaneuring through the notional nation’s
nominal capital, in any boutique you can buy Levi’s,
Wrangler and Lee jeans, Tommy Hilfiger T-shirts, Nike
trainers, Calvin Klein underwear and NYC baseball caps.
The football jerseys on display in Champion Sports and
Marathon Sports are those of English and Italian clubs,
which is only right and proper when you consider that
most Irish football fans support Premiership sides,
and that the entire Irish international soccer squad
ply their trade abroad, to the extent that the most
outstanding Irish footballer of his generation had few
qualms about choosing full commitment to his club over
any claims his country may still feel it has on him.
In any pub you can drink Bud, Becks, Coors and Miller
Lite (‘Democracy’s Drink’). Are the
men of 1916 turning in their graves ever since Ann Summers
opened a branch of its sex shop opposite the GPO, or
have their decomposed corpses got used to it by now,
whatever about the unease among their not-so-abiding
spirits? Why not trail in and out of Marks & Spencer’s
and Debenham’s, or Waterstone’s and Hodges
Figgis (both owned by the HMV conglomerate)? You could
buy one of those handy compilation CDs M & S thoughtfully
keep stacked by the door: Music for Relaxing with
Friends, (‘Friends are an important part
of our lives’ the sleeve notes tell us), Music
for a Quiet Night In, (‘We all need time
to ourselves’), Music to Chill To, Music
to have a Bath With, Music to Sleep Late By.
Why don’t they have a Punk/New Wave compilation,
Music to Put 5000 Volts through your Nervous System,
(‘We all need youthful rebellion in our lives’)?
If you ignore the smaller, specialist, sole traders,
all your retail musical requirements can be taken care
of by HMV and Tower, where only a small percentage of
what’s available for your delectation will have
originated on these shores. Not only the centre, but
all those malls out there, crisscrossing the country,
are full of P.C. World and Dixons, Foko and Habitat,
which you can pop into after you’ve finished doing
the groceries at Tesco. Face it, you might as well be
in Norfolk (be it East Anglia or Virginia). To describe
where most people on this island live nowadays is to
find yourself talking about everywhere and nowhere:
system-built estates, clogged-up motorways, a vastly
expanded suburbia, multinational factories, shopping
centres such as Liffey Valley where the food court is
called South Beach and is decked out with stray bits
of Florida, just as any Irish pub from Germany to Japan
is decorated with newly-minted, old authentic Irish
street signs. Oh, and that favourite ‘local’
you used to frequent will surely have had its second
makeover by now, whether or not it changed hands in
the process. What you are witnessing as you walk, and
living thorough in your life, is apparently a phenomenon
known as globalisation, and you did ask for it, suckers.
It has made Ireland as atomised as most everywhere else
in the so-called developed world. The smaller the world
has got, the more isolated people have become from each
other. Are you happy now, with all this freedom of choice?
How much choice, exactly, do you need?

Of course, if Dublin doesn’t exist, we must ask,
by extension, does Ireland? Is it not a presumptively
metropolocentric to make the capital representative
of the whole country? Brendan Behan, a writer and a
Dubliner whose public persona of the lighteningly quick-witted
drunk with the Big Personality effectively put pay to
any enduring literary reputation he might have accomplished
(that, sadly, is your fate if you become that most dreaded
of incarnations, ‘A Dublin Character’),
once quipped, ‘There are only three places in
Ireland: Dublin, the North, and the country’.
Under this reductive rubric, what is the average contemporary
Dubliner’s view of those other two places, now?

Well, Northerners are funny, and they’re funny
because they bring religion into everything, despite
the fact that whatever troubles they may have, or have
had, are really a sociological problem. Protestants
and Catholics: what was that about? No one down here
would care to be caught dead admitting it, but the truth
is that partition has worked, if what it set out to
do was forge different mindsets for what were once called
nationalists, on opposite sides of the border. ‘You
didn’t help us, you abandoned us,’ they
accuse. ‘Hey, sorry pal, but it wasn’t my
problem in the first place,’ we reply. Most Southerners
(and most Brits too, by the way), take the not unreasonable
view that the Republican and the Unionist communities
in the North are like two kids fighting in the backyard:
your sympathies undoubtedly lie more with your own little
horror rather than with your neighbour’s, but
really you wish they’d both just grow up, straighten
out their own differences, and get on with the business
of living. Beyond that, the human rights element of
the equation is no more or less significant to most
younger Dubliners than it is in Angola or East Timor.
There is a little bit of annoyance, though, that what
with all the great changes going on down here, the North
continues to hijack a disproportionate amount of the
international discourse about this island. It wouldn’t
do for residual atavistic violence to go spoiling our
bright new economic miracle, now would it? But, happily,
most Northern Tims with a modicum of sense in their
heads, and the available wherewithal, and not a few
of the more enlightened Billys too, got out and came
down here, or went to London, or Scotland, as fast as
their legs could carry them. So that’s all right,
then. Plus, we elected a President from up there, just
to show good face and salve our consciences a little,
if we ever feel we need to. That, in turn, released
the former incumbent, so she could go and do a proper
job of work, at the United Nations.
As for ‘the country’, well, don’t
fool yourself that milking a cow is any more real and
authentic than shopping for Prada, or that a scenic
mountain or lake view is inherently any more beautiful
and uplifting than the panorama of a city skyline. To
be sure, what makes Behan’s generalisation funny
is its utter wrong-headedness, since one only has to
go a few miles down the road in any rural area, never
mind into a neighbouring county, to come across vastly
different histories and attitudes and landscapes. But,
with people commuting to work in Dublin from as far
away as Portlaoise, not to mention Dundalk and Wexford
and all points in between, could we not more usefully
ask: where does suburbia end, and the country begin?
Maybe the country’s existence is expiring, hot
on the heels of the capital’s. While it is still
cheaper to inhabit this dormitory conurbation, especially
if one is of an age when being out and about every night
is no longer an all-consuming imperative, it is also
worth inquiring: how far west do you have to go to get
some peace and quiet?

Don’t think for a moment that in any of the foregoing
I am ranting sophomorically against ‘foreign influences’.
That kind of railing would place me a bit too close
for comfort to the same camp as that inhabited by the
neo-conservatives, with their misty-eyed nostalgia for
the traditional values of the ‘real’ Ireland.
But I do say that free market values (some people’s
version of ‘freedom’) have been swallowed
wholesale, and solely for money. Get with the programme,
bud. ‘God bless the child that has its own.’
Can anyone even remember when ‘only in it for
the money’ was the grossest insult imaginable?
The tragedy is that, sandwiched as it is between two
much larger English-speaking landmasses, with two far
more robust economies, Ireland was ideally located to
pick and choose, to sift and sort, the positive from
the negative, the wheat from the chaff, from the experience
of its two most influential neighbours and trading partners.
The twin pillars of popular culture – music and
movies – have, after all, always been the most
interesting things to come out of America, or out of
Britain, for that matter. Instead, Whore Ireland lay
down and took it both ways, without any regard for fusty
old concepts like human agency, or national sovereignty,
or individual integrity. Independent? We ain’t.
No country is an island. But some countries are far
more sure of what and who they are and aren’t
than this one is, to the extent that they don’t
even have to sit around thinking and talking about it
all the time. For, what was Cathleen Ni Houlihan doing
while she traded her favours? Why, to put the hypocritical
icing on the cake of easy virtue, she lay back and thought
of Ireland, or so she gave out. But, that’s okay
too, since all those multinational factories and retail
outlets and leisure centres provide lots of employment
for the lower orders, and all the increased prosperity
has driven up the price of property, for those lucky
enough or solvent enough to buy at the right time, or
to have bought long before the mass hysteria got into
full swing. But, if she sold her body so easily, what
price her soul? Because don’t try to tell me that
we didn’t sell our souls. And don’t even
try to tell me that we simply sold our souls, and there’s
nothing wrong with that, since everybody’s doing
it, doing it, doing it. Because maybe we had no souls
to sell to begin with. Or, if we did, maybe they weren’t
worth very much anyway, and went not even to the highest
bidder, but on a first come, first served basis. More
likely, as observed earlier, maybe ‘we’
and ‘us’ and ‘our’, and all
those other inclusive plurals, don’t exist, and
this country is made up of some very rich, a lot of
averagely-incomed, and some very poor people, who don’t
necessarily have anything very much in common, their
chance nationality aside. Pretty much like everywhere
else, when you think about it. Either way, Ireland as
such doesn’t exist, if indeed it ever did. Q.E.D.
What would this entity which, for the sake of convenience,
will hereinafter be referred to as Ireland, actually
look like, were it ever miraculously to attain corporeality?

Well, there would be more of a genuine sense of shock
and outrage, rather than hot air and guff, about incidents
like the Taoiseach’s daughter and a member of
a boy band selling exclusive rights to photos of their
wedding in France to a celebrity magazine, while hospital
trolleys groan under the weight of expiring pensioners,
and primary schools collapse for want of maintenance.
Let us eat cake? Fair enough. It’s no secret that
the backdrop for the Celtic Tiger’s Great Leap
Forward was a non-existent public health service (a
particular hobby-horse of mine, since I have first-hand
experience of becoming embroiled in it for an agonisingly
lengthy period, due to medical mishap). While this is
hardly the forum to rehearse arguments already elucidated
with greater rigour in books like After The Ball
by Fintan O’Toole and Unhealthy State by
Maev Ann Wren (both available from New Island, should
you care to cast aside that latest piece of pool-side,
page-turning chick lit from Poolbeg that you’re
flying through), we can still speculate: why is whatever
the local equivalent of The Bastille is not stormed?
If Ireland were real, there would be far more vocal
and strenuous objections to living in ‘Rip-off
Ireland’, and to Dublin vying with Helsinki as
the most expensive capital city in Europe. ‘You
say you want a revolution?’ Well, well, maybe
not. But it is a bit irritating that we constantly hear
it paraded as a self-evident truth in the mass-media
that ‘Capitalism defeated Communism’, end
of story. It was not, after all, some inherent design
flaw in Marxism, its negligence in factoring in human
ambition and/or greed to its game plan, that ultimately
bankrupted the Soviet Union, but rather that country’s
inability to continue paying the high cost of keeping
up the arms race. Also, we tend to pass over blithely
the fact that much of the wealth of the United States
was built on genocide and slavery. And, whatever you
think about the Big Moustache’s (Stalin’s)
20 million dead as against the Little Moustache’s
(Hitler’s) measly 6 million, and about the serious
abuses of power in the repressive regimes of Eastern
Bloc dictatorships, and in Mao’s China, what went
on behind the Berlin Wall did underwrite much socialist
aspiration in the western world. Finally, if Ireland
had truly taken its place among the nations of the world,
the domestic television and film industries, and home-based
artistic expression in general, would be a lot more
vibrant and cutting-edge, rather than hearing every
half-arsed, cobbled-together, middle-of-the-road production
hailed as the very incarnation of the contemporary national
zeitgeist, with its finger firmly to the pulse of what’s
really happening.

As I set out, day after day, from the compact and bijou
two-up two-down in Harold’s Cross, and head off
on the short journey towards the city centre, ‘I
feel like a stranger, feel like a stranger in my own
home town’. When I hit Leonard’s Corner,
whether I continue along Clanbrassil Street, or turn
right or left into the South Circular Road, all around
me are immigrants of every stripe: Africans, Muslims,
Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese, Bosnians, Romanians, Poles.
You name them, we’ve got them. But they are not
the reason that I feel displaced. Rather, it is with
them that I most closely identify. I have, after all,
been an emigrant myself, as were so many ’80s
Irish kids. They do all the boring jobs, the grunt work,
that the indigenous population won’t do anymore.
The blacks in the jacks, indeed. They will also be the
first to suffer, should the natives ever chance to find
themselves not as flush as they are now sometime in
the future. Like many other people born here, I have
no more of a stake in this country than they do. I know,
as they do, that ‘Life is Elsewhere’, as
Kundera had it, via Rimbaud. ‘This land is
your land, this land is my land’. I don’t
think so. Already the fancy restaurants aren’t
as jammers as they were when the Tiger roared at its
loudest. The much-vaunted, new-found self-confidence
which was supposed to have seen off the shenanigans
of the old Banana Republic is beginning to look as though
it was paper thin. The cracks are starting to show in
the widely-hailed modernity we heard so much about.
The real boomtown rats – those multinational execs
– have now moved on, to even more favourable investment
destinations, where there are people even more willing
to lie down and be exploited – to the Pacific
Rim – India, China, the Philippines; or maybe
not even as far afield – to Warsaw, Prague, Estonia,
Latvia, Slovakia, Slovenia. What have they left in their
wake?

No more than the commentators I am taking issue with
here, I have little idea of what exactly the future
holds. But I do think that extolling the virtues of
the past, when they are made synonymous with the dead
hand of the forces of reaction, is not tenable. Nor,
for that matter, is pinning your hopes on taking refuge
in postmodern irony. Irony is only what we use to keep
things from hurting too much, and it’s not like
you have to hunt too far for it these days. Just try
getting through all your conversations on any given
day without encountering someone who employs that tedious
habit of flexing the index and middle fingers of both
hands to indicate that what they are saying is taking
place inside inverted commas, and hearing that mocking,
knowing tone enter their voice.

Maybe it is just plain silly to expect anything to be
wholly original ever again. Perhaps various forms of
pastiche are the only originality left, at least after
one has arrived at a certain age. But, in contradistinction
to the neo-conservatives, and the neo-liberals, I do
believe in a kind of secret history, an alternative
tradition, with its own breath of references and range
of influences. I also think it has very little to do
with whatever shower of cute hoors and conniving buffoons
are parking their arses on the government benches of
the Dail for any given five year term. For it is bigger
than any country, and more powerful than any political
administration, and if you appreciate it, or consider
yourself part of it, you don’t have to worry so
much about the government (unless, that is, you’re
Cecilia Ahern or David Kitt). I mean, would you trust
a politician? This other tradition, let’s call
it culture if you like, is made up of all the great
poetry and novels and plays that have ever been written,
all the great music ever composed and played, all the
great paintings ever painted and great movies ever made.
Endless Art. One art. And just maybe, this culture is
not some peripheral optional extra, but the heart of
the matter.

Robert Bly, a gent who in his glorified self-help manual
Iron John advocated that men go back to dancing
around fires in forests and thumping their chests in
order to rediscover and get in touch with their lost
masculinity, is much invoked by those who would hark
back to simpler and supposedly better times. Neo-conservatives
have taken on board Bly’s notion of ‘the
sibling society’, in which he characterises the
younger generation as being intent upon destroying its
own heritage of what he calls ‘vertical’
culture, in favour of the ‘horizontal’ culture
of its peer generation, summarised as including pop
music, movies, television and a limited range of books
which relate to the other mediums much more than to
any literary or artistic heritage, and excluding everything
else. But the great tradition I am positing is far richer
and more fecund, more all embracing and all inclusive,
than anything Bly or his acolytes could ever comprehend,
with their simplistic divisions of ‘High’
and ‘Low’ culture. Culture with a capital
C includes Pop Culture, after all, and today’s
high art, from Shakespeare to Mozart, was yesterday’s
popular entertainment. There are thousands of examples
of the seamlessness of cultural expression between generations,
but one will suffice here: all those parallels with
Homer’s Odyssey in the Coen Brothers’
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (This, incidentally,
isn’t so different from the use James Joyce made
of The Odyssey in Ulysses, although
he was either ignored or vilified by the Irish establishment
during his lifetime, his ‘Irishness’ only
claimed and celebrated over the past twenty years or
so, when it became both profitable and popular to do
so.) As it stands, Bly’s championing of Arnoldian
‘high seriousness’ over what are still dismissed
as ephemeral music and movies is no different from that
of the schoolmaster recollected by Hanif Kureishi in
his essay ‘Eight Arms to Hold You’, who,
in 1968, told his students straight-facedly and sanctimoniously
that John Lennon and Paul McCartney, as lower-middle-class
provincial boys without significant musical education,
couldn’t possibly have written their own songs
(Brian Epstein and George Martin did that!).

Dunno. Maybe I’m a neo-radical, or a neo-revisionist.
The ’90s were just the ’80s all over again,
with better clothes. Is it too cockeyed to hope that
the Noughties might signal some kind of rebirth of ’60s
rebellion? It’s no secret that Ireland’s
much-vaunted ’90s prosperity came about largely
through the injection of E.U. structural funds, and
giving generous tax breaks to American multinationals.
Unfortunately, one of the Tanaiste’s most oft-quoted
gems of wisdom is that Ireland is closer to Boston than
Berlin in terms of its outlook, a pronouncement so banal
in its transparent stating-of-the-bloody-obvious that
the only perplexing aspect of it is that she clearly
thinks this is A Good Thing.

As Ireland finds itself in the midst of hosting another
E.U. Presidency, is it again way too far-fetched to
look forward to a time when this country might begin
to take its cue from the models of social democracy
practiced by the countries who have been at the heart
of that organisation from its inception and who (whatever
about their own tainted history of exploitative colonialism),
through relatively recent painful first-hand experience
of the horrors of war, refused to be bullied into an
unjustifiable one by extremists within America? Or will
Ireland merely continue adopting wholesale the American-style,
business-based divided society, which sponsors cut-throat
competitiveness and ruthless self-aggrandisement at
the expense of mutual tolerance and social cohesion?
Me, I’m not just interested in how many U.S. planes
refuelled at Shannon on the way out to Iraq; I’d
also like to know how many body bags passed through
it on the way back.

So, long live youth; for while, as Shaw famously had
it, it remains ‘too precious to be wasted on the
young’, there is still hope for it if you keep
in mind something Kafka wrote in his Diaries:
‘Anyone who retains the ability to see beauty
never truly grows old.’ Keats knew that beauty
is truth, truth beauty, and that ‘a thing of beauty
is a joy forever.’ Maybe being young has very
little to do with one’s chronological age, and
much more to do with attitude. ‘No one’s
sailed this sea before,’ said Keith Richards in
a recent interview, going on to point out that rock’n’roll
is only as old as The Stones are. Rather than sneering
at wrinkly rockers and wondering why they don’t
pack it in, what’s to stop them going on and still
doing it in their 70s and 80s, if they’re physically
fit enough, as the old Delta blues men did? For why
are The Rolling Stones still touring in their 60’s?
Last year’s round the world Licks jaunt may have
grossed €80m+, but is that the sole reason any
of them did it? Do their pension plans need topping
up that much? Or is touring still the best way for them
to meet girls? Bassist Bill Wyman had had enough a few
years ago, and bowed out then. Has no one ever thought
that maybe the ones who are still standing might actually
like doing what they do? Dr Hank Wangford, the country
singing GP, when asked for his medical opinion on why
Richards, an individual who has over-indulged in things
that are bad for you enough to last most mere mortals
several lifetimes, was still going strong, summarised
his diagnosis thus, ‘If you have a lot of money
and continue working at something you’re committed
to and that satisfies you, then you can go on being
a junkie. Keith has a genetic strength and, just as
importantly, he has an appetite for life. He wants to
be here.’ Bob Dylan has been quoted as saying
that the reason he keeps his never-ending tour on the
road for over three hundred nights every year is that
the only time he feels happy is when he’s on stage.
Nor is it the case that rock musicians are incapable
of dealing with weighty, fraught subject matter. Lou
Reed, who with songs like ‘Venus in Furs’
and ‘Femme Fatale’, wrote so well about
sex and love in his youth, is equally adroit at addressing
death and bereavement in his mature years, as albums
like Songs for Drella and Magic and Loss
plainly show. When asked a while back by an interviewer
how long it was feasible to go on playing rock’n’roll,
Uncle Lou replied, ‘Ask yourself how long you
can go on writing novels, or painting pictures. There’s
your answer.’

So, what you have to do is find something you are good
at and love doing and can live by, as the longevity
of the careers of those just mentioned demonstrates.
Wilde, in his essay ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’,
argued that there was much tosh talked about the inherent
dignity of labour, and that it was impossible for a
man to have dignity if he was shovelling snow at a crossroads
for twelve hours a day. In a similar vein, poet Michael
Longley opined, on giving up his job at the arts council
of Northern Ireland to concentrate on his writing, that
‘work is very overrated’. But these are
hardly employments designed to lift the heart and sustain
the spirit. Work may not be its own reward, but work
you believe in and enjoying doing is. For either you
love what you do, after a certain age (and, if you are
lucky, do who you love), or you die, metaphorically
and sometimes literally, often by your own hand. ‘Work
And Love’, as Herr Doktor Freud himself had it,
as the best chance of living a happy and productive
life. That’s why all those grey politicians, who
have long since forgotten the meaning of words like
truth and beauty, if indeed they ever knew it in the
first place, look as sad as they do, and can behave
with such callous abandon. They don’t do good
work.

'Hey, hey, my, my, Rock’n’Roll will
never die’, at least for the people who loved
it passionately to begin with, and for whom it was the
strongest formative influence in their lives, the soundtrack
to which they had all their first-time experiences.
One can only have faith that the force of global youth
culture, forever renewing and reinventing itself, and
indeed of all of culture, is stronger than that of global
capitalism, engaged as they are in a complicated, symbiotic
face-off, which is a constant battle of wits.

And that’s my take on this identity thing, personal,
national and national, for the young, the not so young,
and young at heart.

Portions from this article appeared in the June 2004
edition of The Dubliner magazine.

Desmond Traynor is a Dublin-born writer
and critic. Educated at UCD and Trinity, he has lived
and worked in Holland, Italy, Spain, England and the
US. His short stories have been widely published and
anthologised, and his academic articles, criticism and
reviews have appeared in many Irish and international
newspapers, magazines and journals. A Hennessy Literary
Award winner, his first novel, The Myth of Exile
and Return, was published by Silenzio Press last
year, and nominated for the Hughes and Hughes/Sunday
Independent Novel of the Year Award.